1874.] OF THE HOUSE OF DELEGATES. 535

reserved the power to alter and change the Act of incorporat-
ing the President and Visitors of the Maryland Hospital,
whenever it may seem right for the Legislature to do
so. The Asylum is a large and commodious building,
constructed with special reference to the needs and re-
quirements of the insane. Modern improvements in heating,
lighting, and ventilators have been introduced, although the
expenses incurred in the construction of the heating appara-
tus, and in operating the same, seems to your Committee to
have been extraordinarily large, and every convenience ap-
proved by experience has been employed for the security and
sanitary advantages of its inmates. The officers, from the
President down to attendants, seems to have been selected
with due regard to those traits of character that ensure firm
but kindly treatment of the insane, and your Committee were
pleased to find none of those evidences of brutal treatment
which are said to be the approbia of many of the so-called
asylums. The capacity of the Institution is sufficient to
accommodate two hundred and fifty patients comfortably,
and by crowding, three hundred might be taken care of
within, its walls. At present its patients number one hun-
dred and sixty, about one-third of whom are pay-patients,
and the rest supported by the counties.

The Institution is in debt for the completion and furnishing
of the building, to the amount of $53,153.08, and ask an
appropriation to cover this amount at present it relies upon
its pay-patients as a chief resource for the payment of its ex-
penses, but its visitors suggest that it would be more equita-
ble to conduct it as a purely charitable Institution, and to
divide the whole annual cost of conducting the establishment
by the number of patients it will accommodate, and having
thus ascertained the cost per patient, to allow each county to
send as many as its proportion of a general tax would at
that rate pay for.

The Committee have also visited four other charitable In-
stitutions, and beg leave to report as follows in reference to
them:

THE BALTIMORE MANUAL LABOR SCHOOL

is located one mile from the Spring Grove Hospital, and is
devoted to the care and education of indigent boys who have
lost one or both parents, or whose parents are of such a char-
acter and habits as justify the removal of their children from
their influence. These boys are instructed, in addition to the
usual elementary branches of an English education, also in
the arts of husbandry and gardening, and at a suitable age
are bound out to either farmers or mechanics some sixty-
three bright, active, healthy boys, are now in the Institution,
subject to such daily instructions from the superintendent